My Windows XP system with Athlon 64 has a SATA drive box and I wanted to copy a few gigabytes of files to another SATA drive as the data would not fit onto my USB stick. I put in a Western Digital black 1TB 7200rpm drive (WD1001FALS) and Windows XP froze on desktop after detecting the drive. I rebooted and entered BIOS setup only to notice the 1TB drive became a 32MB. Same drive worked fine on my Phenom II one week before and I took great care while handling it. I thought it probably died. I took out another same drive from my drawer, put it into my Athlon 64 system and entered BIOS setup. Again, it was detected as 32MB. Now what a coincidence! Maybe something is wrong with the SATA controller or cable. I put the drives into my Phenom II system and they report just 32MB again. Then I tried them in an external SATA box via USB in my laptop with same results.

Previously, the internal SATA drive box was used for SATA drives successfully but they were older drives, probably not SATA 3.0. It looked like something got corrupted and both drives are now unusable. Googling about the problem leads to finding that "The drive just needs its capacity reset" via tool like HDD Capacity Restore Tool or hdparm. HDD Capacity Restore Tool doesn't work on Windows 7 and later OS. On my Athlon 64 it wasn't able to detect any drives either. I left one of 1TB drives connected in Athlon 64, while I download and burn Ubuntu on a DVD (booting via USB stick is not successful on Gigabyte GA-K8NE for some reason).

Athlon 64 uses the same 1TB drive as its system drive, I have 3 of them from RAID that was lightly used. There is definitely no compatibility problem with the drive.

I left Athlon 64 running with the broken drive connected for about 30 minutes. I rebooted it and suddenly the broken 32MB drive reported 1TB capacity again. I connected it to Phenom II to confirm and it was ok again. I connected the 2nd broken drive to Athlon 64 and as expected it reported just 32MB space. I left it on for about 15-20 minutes, rebooted and BIOS could see the full 1TB capacity.

In the end, no tool was needed and both drives fixed themselves. They appear to be running some kind of internal diagnostics/chkdsk and until it finishes they report just 32MB capacity.